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Ingres VectorWise goes GA, open source by end of year

Ingres have made Ingres VectorWise generally available to download for free evaluation or commercially licence and say that an open source release for the accelerated database technology should be expected by the end of the year.

Ingres VectorWise was announced in summer 2009, when Ingres started working with Amsterdam based research spin-off of CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica), to bring the researchers database technology to market. The VectorWise technology allows users to create vector optimised tables within the Ingres database which are then processed with the new query processing architecture. This architecture makes aggressive use of modern processors multiple cores, large cache memory and SIMD instructions and uses main memory as an I/O buffer and store for intermediate results. This is coupled with a lightweight compressing storage engine to offer high performance queries on the relevant tables.

At the launch, Ingres demonstrated Ingres / VectorWise running in the cloud on an Amazon EC2 instance and compared it with a "well known commercial database" on a system configured with 2 CPUs, 17GB of RAM and a terabyte of storage. The demonstration showed a query, which took a minute on the "well known" database, taking one second on Ingres. The results were backed up with testimonials from a number of customers who have been using the preview release of VectorWise; Datamatics, a business intelligence solutions provider, said they saw "70x performance gains", Rational Commerce called it "blindingly fast out of the box" and dbConcert said they got "10 to 50 times faster" position analysis with their software.

Free evaluation binaries of Ingres VectorWise are available to download for 64-bit x86 Linux. Currently, the core technology of VectorWise is closed source. The H asked Emma McGratten, SVP of Engineering at Ingres, when we could expect to see an open source version of the technology; she says the company is on course to deliver an open source version by the end of this year. McGratten also pointed out that all the supporting database infrastructure was already open source in the form of the existing Ingres database offering and that any improvements to that would automatically be integrated with Ingres / VectorWise. Ingres 10 is due to make its transition from open community development to enterprise with the release of a beta of Ingres 10 for enterprise later this month.

Ingres 10 offers multiple version concurrency control for less read / write lock contention, a single administration API for developers and new web based administration tools built on that API. Other features include SNMP monitoring and integration with the open source Nagios management system. More details on Ingres 10 are available at the Ingres Community site and source code can be downloaded from the company's Subversion repository. It can be downloaded as binaries for 32bit Windows and 32 and 64-bit Linux from the main Ingres site.